The following from Eham demonstrates exactly what I'm running into.... all sorts of hearsay about the Rommel stories, but nothing reliable, nothing first hand, nothing from the press (but isn't that what you'd expect if hams really did crack Rommels communication network? LOL!):

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RE: PLC... An Emerging Threat to Ham Radio: by AB5XZ on May 13, 2003 Mail this to a friend!I haven't been able to find any documentation of this statement, which I made in an earlier post to this topic:

"Consider the Third Reich's nifty 28 MHz communication system, used in North Africa by Rommel. The system was designed and tested during a solar minimum, and it worked well for localized communications. Unfortunately, it was deployed in North Africa during a solar maximum, and hams in the US easily overheard the communications - and passed them on to the Pentagon!"

Please don't use it in any comment to the FCC, because it can't be verified as accurate.

One ham who did monitor Rommel's communications network was in Egypt at the time, so not far away. He was in the British Army, and was Rowley Shears, G8KW - later the youngest major in the British Army, and who was awarded the BEM (British Empire Medal, military division) for his various wartime efforts, some of them behind enemy lines. He went on to found KW Electronics in the UK, who made a lot of ham gear. He was also instrumental in the restoration of ham radio in Germany after WW2 and helped set up the DARC.

I read a similar story in one of the ham mags a few years ago. A US ham heard the panzers on 10m or nearby and started talking to them, or some of them at least. Then he told the fcc/fbi/army and the since N Africa panzer skip came in well at his location they built an lp nearby manned by feds, think this was East coast somewhere. There were a few other places in the US where the skip dropped panzer sigs.

Logged

If you have a clumsy child, you make them wear a helmet. If you have death prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.

I read a similar story in one of the ham mags a few years ago. A US ham heard the panzers on 10m or nearby and started talking to them, or some of them at least. Then he told the fcc/fbi/army and the since N Africa panzer skip came in well at his location they built an lp nearby manned by feds, think this was East coast somewhere. There were a few other places in the US where the skip dropped panzer sigs.

U.S. hams weren't on the air after December 7, 1941. Hams didn't talk with the enemy. Were these Nazi tanks signing with DL/5A calls to establish their location? Perhaps they gave grid squares upon request. The gov't didn't have to build listening posts (if thats what an "lp" is). They already had thousands around the world at the peak of WW2.

If you've got a reasonably original source, post it. Every report I've found seems to be about 5th hand. Indeed these stories seem to come out of the 1990s, and not the immediate post war period.

Sorry pal all I can do is try to remember what I read. During the Second World War, the North African Campaign took place in North Africa from 10 June 1940 to 13 May 1943. By the way, did you notice that some of the war in Africa was before Dec 7th, 1941?

Logged

If you have a clumsy child, you make them wear a helmet. If you have death prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.

If an Amateur -- or anyone, for that matter -- had attempted to tranmit stateside during WWII on any of the HF bands, any arrest made would have been of that person. Again, it was illegal for civilians of any kind to transmit during WWII and the US had plenty of listening stations, add to that the fact that those Amateurs who remained stateside often listened to their receivers and were to report anything heard that they believed to come from stateside - and they did. Things were not like they are today at all.

As previously stated the correct unit of frequency was cycles per second, not simply cycles.Changing it to Hertz was just one of several changes to the naming system to make it SI compliant.The unit of magnetic flux density was also named the Tesla, in recognition of Nikola Tesla, the European immigrant to the USA.His contribution to the electrification of the U.S.A. was immense, and he was in fact the inventor of radio, not Marconi.

Tesla invented most of the A.C. polyphase distribution system still in use today, as well as the A.C. induction motor.The first big hydro-electric project at Niagra falls was his design and started the large scale modern electrical transformation of the U.S.A.

Tesla however, was a dreamer, who died penny-less in a hotel room in new york, paid for by a small bequest from the Westinghouse corporation.Westinghouse bought Tesla's A.C. patents early in his career, and formed the giant electrical corporation using many of them.

Heinrich Hertz also made the first radio transmission and reception over a few feet (using a spark transmitter and spark gap receiver), so it is fitting that he be honored with the unit of frequency.

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